


love-love

by duskglow



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - College/University, Character Study, Domestic Fluff, Friends to Lovers, I think?, Introspection, M/M, i overuse the words sweet and soft. what else is new, this is just a lot of Flowery Words
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-14 06:26:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29291322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/duskglow/pseuds/duskglow
Summary: Sometimes Oikawa will inch closer, too, until he’s fully on top of Hajime, practically suffocating him under his big body and heavy limbs and Hajime feels so weighed down by sweetness that he could choke on it. Oikawa’s always restricting Hajime’s airflow in one way or another, anyway, so Hajime figures he doesn’t mind all that much when the love-love lodges itself in his throat, threatening to spill out into the open air and twinkle there like gems in the bruised night sky.
Relationships: Iwaizumi Hajime/Oikawa Tooru
Comments: 26
Kudos: 121





	love-love

**Author's Note:**

> i intended for this to be a throwback to those 2016 era iwaoi fics (you know the ones... college au mutual pining friends to lovers domestic bliss Perfection) but it kinda turned out ... hm ... not that way. more like a more melancholic, romanticized, shorter version of that. i am posting it anyway  
> PS i wrote this Big Jumble of Nonsense while listening to phoebe bridgers. listen to [garden song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1LqnTuQNHc&ab_channel=DavidDeanBurkhart)

The kettle screams from the kitchen while the TV buzzes quietly, almost on mute. Hajime blinks awake from his doze. He can’t remember his dream — never really does — but he thinks it was pleasant. It’s snowing just outside, fat flakes floating downward and landing on their window’s empty balcony. Hajime’s eyes follow the trail of one flake in particular, and he watches it float and land and slowly melt away until there’s nothing at all; another one takes its place not long after. There’s a weight on Hajime’s chest, heavy but not suffocating.

He looks down. Strands of cinnamon hair, bright and sweet. From his vantage point, Hajime can even see some grey ones mixed in. He makes a quiet noise. Oikawa makes a noise back and it’s way more sleep-addled and incoherent than Hajime’s was. He rolls his eyes and begins to comb through Oikawa’s pristine dandruff-free artfully-curled hair, trying to find and count all of the greys.

“What’re you doing?” Oikawa asks. He shifts closer. His soft hands clutch at the front of Hajime’s soft sweatshirt. Everything is so soft and for an unnecessarily introspective moment, Hajime thinks about how lucky he is, how nice this feels, how much he love-loves his best friend. Because that’s what this is. _Love-love_ , bright and sweet like Oikawa’s brown hair, and rich like his voice, and luminescent like his entire heart and soul and being. And for this single, drawn-out moment, Hajime really wants to say something.

“You have seven grey hairs,” Hajime informs him instead.

The thing about love-love is that it can wait.

Oikawa makes a sound akin to a dying bird and immediately pulls back, sitting up on the couch — which really means that he is now effectively straddling Hajime’s hips — and cradling both of his hands to his scalp. “Iwa-chan,” he complains. “Why would you count them? Oh, what if I’m dying? I’m so old, I already have _grey hairs_ —”

“You’re twenty-one,” Hajime says, blunt as he’s always been. “Would you stop being so dramatic?”

Oikawa scowls. “And why haven’t you gotten the tea? The kettle’s been going off for ten minutes, you know!”

“It can wait,” Hajime says; like so many other things, the tea can wait. 

What he doesn’t say is _I was too preoccupied with you_. It’s unspoken, yes, but Oikawa picks up on it anyway because he’s Oikawa and he always picks up on the things that Hajime unsays to him. He flushes red, the color of fresh strawberries, and it’s pretty on his cheeks and the tips of his perfectly rounded ears.

“Whatever,” Oikawa says. He’s always grumpy after being woken from mid-afternoon naps, so his tone is a bit more short than usual; unfortunately, Hajime finds it incredibly endearing. Oikawa’s huffs in half-feigned exasperation and he shifts around until he’s finally managed to get up off of Hajime’s stomach. He steps into his slippers — awful bright green ones, because while Oikawa does have an eye for aesthetics in interior design, his taste in clothes is absolutely abysmal — and he shuffles into the kitchen to turn off the stove. The sweeping of his slippers over the tiled floor is rhythmic, even if Oikawa doesn’t make nearly as much noise as Hajime does, and the kettle’s scream slowly dies. And then there’s just the buzzing of the near-muted TV while Oikawa fixes up their tea: plain barley for Hajime, and black tea with honey for Oikawa because he needs all of the sweetness with none of the judgement. 

When he reenters their living room, the TV is playing a docu-drama about an expedition to the top of Mount Everest that found something quote unquote "supernatural in nature." It’s all just a load of horseshit but Oikawa’s eyes immediately fix to the screen, riveted, and he holds out Hajime’s mug. The mug is an old thing, printed with the Great Wave painting, and it could almost be considered classy if it wasn’t for the fact that there’s a large Godzilla painted in the background. Hajime likes to think it is at the very least a little bit tasteful, especially in comparison to Oikawa’s mug. Oikawa has had the same ugly grey-green alien head mug since middle school and there’s a chip on the rim which must be a pain to avoid when he's sipping, but he doesn’t seem to care. 

Hajime watches him watch the TV and blow on his hot and overly-sweet tea and breathe in, then breathe out. Oikawa’s the kind of person who makes breathing look like art. He’s so nice to look at. Not just his pretty face, because that’s a given; but the way Oikawa exists is captivating. The way he sits on the lumpy couch in their shitty sixth-floor apartment, looking like an angel plucked out of the heavenly celestial planes and placed right here next to Hajime, of all people, is magnificent. The way his eyelashes are so unnecessarily long and fan out over his cheeks, distracting from the puffiness underneath his eyes, is stunning. The way he leans over to loop one of his arms around Hajime’s is so casual yet certain that it makes Hajime’s heart pound. Oikawa is just… So much of everything. It’s kind of truly amazing.

On a commercial break, Oikawa takes a sip of his tea and then looks over at Hajime, who had been staring unabashedly. “What?” he asks. His lips are shiny, the top one curving into a perfect bow. He’s cupid; he’s Aphrodite, he’s the whole pantheon of Greek gods that Hajime was forced to learn about in their elementary school curriculum, for reasons unknown. He’s an angel, or maybe an alien. Hajime just thinks there’s just no way that Oikawa could be a real, living human. He’s way too ethereal for that.

“You’d tell me if you were actually an alien, right?” Hajime asks, seemingly out of nowhere.

Oikawa’s face lights up. He’s not as subtle about it as he had been in high school, when interests like that were deemed embarrassing by cliquey third years and Oikawa had shoved all of his alien clothes into the bottoms of his dresser drawers. “Iwa-chan, of course I would,” he vows, face completely serious, and Hajime believes him.

He’s always believed him.

Living with Oikawa is a dream.

He’s a startlingly good roommate, for one. He never makes any messes. Oikawa actually hates messes in general, so every Sunday he arms himself with various cleaning supplies and goes to town on their entire small shitty apartment. He is a sight to behold with a pink bandana pushing back his bangs and a green apron printed with frogs cinched around his lean waist. He scrubs the floors and dusts the blinds. He wipes down the kitchen with a rag and cleaner that smells like citrus, and he sprays the entire square footage of their shitty apartment with a can of lavender-scented Febreeze and by mid-afternoon their home is fresh and clean and wonderful.

Hajime sometimes pretends to study when really, he’s watching the whirlwind of Windex and wet-wipes that is his best friend. Other times he offers to do both of their laundry, since he is Iwaizumi Hajime and he’s never felt right about doing nothing while someone else is doing so much work. And other times Hajime cooks, noodles or rice or fish or something along those lines so that when Oikawa’s done, he has something to eat.

Which is a whole other thing. 

If food is a love language, then Hajime thinks he's gotten pretty good at it. He buys snacks for Oikawa on his way back from class, and whips him up tea and coffee with all of the sugar and honey added, and he brings him plates of food in the middle of intense study sessions when Oikawa somehow always forgets that he requires sustenance because he is a functioning living thing — Hajime’s still too hesitant to say human being, on account of Oikawa’s overwhelming ethereality. 

Hajime recalls the first time he’d cut up ripe peaches into perfect slices, peeling the skins and removing the pits and placing pieces of sweetness into one big bowl. When he'd presented it to a wide-eyed Oikawa, he'd immediately burst into big, ugly tears. They didn’t talk about it, not really, but Hajime held Oikawa close and breathed in the leftover lavender lingering in his t-shirt and told Oikawa that he loved him. With the fruit, of course, but also with a hand in his hair, on his back, around his wrist; another one on the nape of his neck, up and down his spine, rubbing rhythmically over the skin on his knuckles. Not with words, but with so much touch. And Oikawa, who’s always defaulted to physical affection when expressing those kinds of too-much emotions, says it back when he leans in and places his head on Hajime’s shoulder.

“Thank you,” Oikawa says, later, into the soft cotton of Hajime’s sheets, long after both of their Hajime-mandated bedtimes. He’s brushed his teeth but he still smells like peaches.

“You’re welcome,” Hajime mumbles back, half-asleep and pleasantly hazy from dreams and everything that Oikawa is, and then they both let go.

(“I’m home,” Oikawa calls wearily, kicking boots off in the genkan and slumping over to their lumpy couch where Hajime is sitting. He begins discarding all of his layers so that he can sink into Hajime’s body, his warmth, absorb all of the pleasant heat waiting for him beneath the green-blue of the blanket and melt into Hajime, fuse together like they were never meant to be apart in the first place.

“Welcome home,” Oikawa calls from the kitchen on Hajime’s long days when he has several labs. Even though Oikawa has practice and classes, too, he still makes dinner; he’s good at it when he tries and also when doesn’t let himself get too distracted. So Oikawa makes good food, and Hajime says thank you and he digs in and he feels Oikawa’s eyes on him and he sprouts like a plant in the everlasting sunlight.)

Oikawa doesn’t sleep in his own futon anymore, which is honestly unsurprising, since this sort of thing has been happening since their early childhood. Whenever they had sleepovers, Oikawa would completely disregard his own futon in order to jump into Hajime’s bed. He always had to be right beside him.

All this is fine, but Oikawa is also a man now, no longer a tiny boy with spindly limbs. Now he’s tall and broad and athletic and big. He’s a man, and for whatever reason he brazenly neglects to wear pants when he goes to sleep. This is a problem for Hajime for many reasons but mostly because Oikawa has really, really long legs. Like, absurdly long. Way longer than Hajime’s, and there’s a lot of skin exposed just below the hem of his boxers, which of course ride high on his hips. His legs are all moles and birthmarks and scars and the fine dusting of hair that Oikawa doesn’t care to shave during winter. Of course, Oikawa sleeps like a fucking starfish, too. He always ends up draping himself all over Hajime’s front when Hajime is just about to fade into peaceful oblivion.

At the beginning, Hajime didn’t know how to cope with it all. Oikawa’s legs, his starfishing, everything else that comes with sleeping with his best friend. Especially his skin. Over time, though, Hajime supposes he got used to all of it. He’s known Oikawa his whole life but has never been given the chance to become familiar with the skin of his calves and knees and thighs, so now whenever Oikawa brings one of his legs up to rest on Hajime’s hip, he’ll reach a hand out and let it run a path up and down, up and down. He’s half-asleep and so is Oikawa who makes little contented sounds, his hums resembling the purrs of a cat warming in the sun.

Sometimes Oikawa will inch closer, too, until he’s fully on top of Hajime, practically suffocating him under his big body and heavy limbs and Hajime feels so weighed down by sweetness that he could choke on it. Oikawa’s always restricting Hajime’s airflow in one way or another, anyway, so Hajime figures he doesn’t mind all that much when the love-love lodges itself in his throat, threatening to spill out into the open air and twinkle there like gems in the bruised night sky.

Hajime has an awful dream one night. And the following day, during one of his boring biology lectures, he realizes that he really, really likes touching Oikawa, in a way that might not be so platonic.

He thinks about it the whole way home, lost in his own head, so much so that he bumps into several people several times. He thinks about his silky hair and soft skin and smooth legs. Oikawa’s composite textures are very pleasing — and Hajime’s always loved Oikawa’s roughness, the way he would get all sharp and intense during practice, eyes narrowed and muscles tensed. But he thinks he loves the softness more, loves the way Oikawa leans into his chest on their lumpy sofa, or the way his hand feels scrubbing through the short hairs at the back of Hajime’s neck, or the way his arms feel hooked over Hajime’s shoulders in order to draw him closer — for warmth or affection or sweetness, it is unclear.

Touching Oikawa is also a dream. So many dreams, Hajime doesn’t know if he should ever wake up.

“I’m home,” Hajime calls into the pleasant lightness of their shitty apartment, and Oikawa calls, “Welcome home,” back. Hajime toes off his shoes and hangs up his jacket and finds Oikawa in the kitchen, soft music from his phone swirling around in the room. There’s various ingredients strewn around their countertops, a mess of eggshells and mounds of granulated sugar. Oikawa himself is wearing the frog apron again, bangs tied back, and he’s got flour on his clothes and his cheek and nose. He’s so cute. Hajime’s throat tightens again.

“I’m making matcha cake!” Oikawa says by way of explanation. It’s one of those good days where the smile makes his face even more handsome than usual, which means that when he grins it’s practically mortally wounding. Hajime is sweating a bit. Oikawa is so, so pretty.

“How come?” he asks.

Oikawa hums, finger tapping on his chin. “I was watching a baking show while I was studying earlier, and one of the contestants made a really nice matcha cake, and it made me want one. So I went to the store and bought the ingredients.”

Hajime squints. “Why wouldn’t you just buy the cake?”

“Now, Iwa-chan, where’s the fun in that?” Oikawa tuts. There’s chocolate in his eyes and vanilla cream on his skin, strawberry parfait in his cheeks where the blush lingers. So sweet. Hajime wants to taste him. 

He shuffles forward loudly in his plain-grey slippers until he’s touching Oikawa and then he leans forward to slide both arms around his middle. Oikawa is so solid beneath his touch, so real and strong. Hajime buries his head in the crook of Oikawa’s neck and smells something too earthy to be perfume but too flowery to be cologne. That’s Oikawa, really — that perfect middle, the balance between all things lovely and great. Hajime presses his lips to Oikawa’s neck and breathes in the scent of him. Touching him this time around feels like so much more than it’s always been.

“Iwa-chan’s acting like an old man again, being all grumpy and mopey,” Oikawa says, knowingly, because he’s sharp as hell and probably more perceptive than anyone Hajime will ever know. He brings his hand up to rub up and down Hajime’s back. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Hajime grumbles.

“Okay, then. What’s up?”

“The sky,” Hajime answers lamely; Oikawa laughs because he’s pretty lame, too.

“That sounds like something Takeru would say. What are you, a twelve year-old?”

“That’s my line,” Hajime says, and he begins to sway in time with the music pouring out of Oikawa’s phone. A woman sings in slow Spanish. Oikawa hums along, perfectly in sync. Hajime reaches for his free hand with one of his own and clutches it to his chest, where Oikawa can feel the steady thumping of his heart beneath the cage of his chest.

“I had a dream,” Hajime tells him, after a handful of silent moments spent swaying.

Oikawa nods. “You don’t usually remember your dreams.”

“I remembered this one,” Hajime says. “I still do.”

A contemplative hum. “Was it bad?”

“I don’t know,” Hajime answers; he inhales, deep. “All that I know is that you — you’d left, for one reason or another. You were gone, and I think I had to wait a long time for you to come back.”

Oikawa almost stills; the hand on the back of Hajime’s neck stutters. “How long?” he asks eventually.

“I don’t know,” Hajime repeats. His voice sounds like it aches when he says, “I just remember missing you like crazy.”

The song dies. Oikawa doesn’t move for a long, silent moment. When the next song starts up, he draws Hajime in closer. “That’s silly,” he says against his temple, in the way he used to when they were kids and his sister would yell at him for saying the word _stupid_. “I’m right here.”

“I know,” Hajime says into Oikawa’s neck. 

“You have me.”

“I do,” Hajime says. It sounds more like a question.

“You do,” Oikawa says, firm, fingers tightening around Hajime’s. “I don’t really plan on leaving, Hajime. And if I — if your dream is somehow predicting the future, then I want you to know now that I was probably waiting for you, too.”

Hajime hums. Oikawa’s hand is still in his, and Hajime’s other hand is on his waist; he straightens to his full height so that he can look into Oikawa’s eyes. He raises their connected hands above their heads to guide Oikawa into a slow spin. “Predicting the future,” Hajime repeats when Oikawa’s facing him again, the strawberry parfait in his cheeks redder than before. “You somehow manage to include your crazy conspiracy theories in everything we talk about.”

Oikawa gasps, offended, even when Hajime takes the opportunity to dip Oikawa down low. His back is arched beautifully beneath Hajime’s palms, and he’s so broad and big and beautiful and Hajime is suddenly so glad that he still makes a point to go to the gym regularly because it means he can hold Oikawa like this, like the way a person like him was meant to be held. Their faces are inches apart. Oikawa’s breath is a little bit of cinnamon and so are his eyes. “It’s not a conspiracy. Dream interpretation is an art form,” he says, in a way that is so wonderfully Oikawa it kind of makes Hajime’s heart hurt, a little.

Hajime slowly draws the both of them back up. Oikawa, tall as always, slouches and effectively ruins his perfect posture in order to place his head on Hajime’s shoulder.

“What do you dream about, then?” Hajime asks, both dreading and anticipating the answer.

Oikawa hums, thinks, and when he speaks he sounds far away somehow, voice slower and softer than Hajime’s ever heard it. “I dream we live in a big house with a big garden in our backyard. And you’re always in the garden, so I come out to you and sit with you and we pick mint from our big garden and we talk. And I’m wearing a sunhat and you’re wearing a baseball cap. We both have gloves on so our hands don’t get dirty. Everything is muddy and the sun is hot and there are so many bugs but — but I’m happy, and so are you.”

Hajime suddenly feels like crying. “I want that,” he croaks, the lump in his throat sinking and settling in the pit of his stomach, erupting into fluttery, free things, like butterflies or maybe moths. Oikawa always did love moths more than butterflies. He loves the way they move toward light.

“Me too,” Oikawa says, and when his lips connect with the skin of Hajime’s cheek, it feels like a big garden in the backyard of a big house that belongs just to them. Like home.

For now, the city is their home, and between the cracks of sidewalk concrete, their garden starts to grow.

Oikawa begins to buy potted plants for their balcony and soon enough, they have a whole collection ranging from fresh herbs to flower bulbs. There’s a mint plant positioned right in the early spring sun. The plants are sweet in and of themselves, full of life and love and things Hajime is trying to understand for both himself and for Oikawa.

Hajime takes care of Oikawa in more ways than one, now. He clips and files and paints his nails on his fingers and toes. He reminds Oikawa to make appointments to get his hair cut because it’s long and if it grows any longer it could do dangerous things to people’s hearts. And he brings him food and kisses the top of his head and strokes the soft skin of his back beneath his shirt and the bare legs beneath the weighted blanket that Oikawa finally moved into Hajime’s room. Everything feels right and soft and sweet, always sweet. And Hajime waits until absolutely everything is rose-colored and completely full of love and life and hope to tell Oikawa what he’s been meaning to say ever since they first met at age five on the playground at the end of their block.

“I’m in love with you,” Hajime admits aloud, easy in the morning light of a Sunday. It’s cleaning day so Oikawa will inevitably tie a bandana into his too-long cinnamon silky hair and tie the silly green froggy apron around his lean waist too, and then he’ll scrub the floors and dust the blinds and spray everything with bright lavender. Hajime decides that today is also a day for cooking because the sweetness that is Oikawa Tooru’s entire angelic being feels even more sweet. He’s ridiculously beautiful like this, with his cheek squished into Hajime’s chest and hair a mess of wavy curls, sleep in his eyes and mouth and body. 

Oikawa says, a bit pompous, “Obviously.” He’d say _I know_ but he’s way more smug than any space opera smuggler from a fictional movie, and not nearly as clichéd. Oikawa always complained about that line, anyway.

Hajime laughs quietly. Oikawa blinks, eyes big and beautiful, and then leans up and captures Hajime’s lips with his own, like there was never any hesitation in the first place. He tastes like chocolate and vanilla cream and strawberry parfait. Hajime shifts and moves and pulls Oikawa closer, closer, until his bare legs are brushing Hajime’s sides. He cradles Oikawa’s perfect face in his hands and kisses him and kisses him and kisses him; and he swears that he smells sharp-sweet mint and rich earth and freshly mowed grass. 

And Hajime thinks: a home is a home. A home could be a person, too. It can be anything, really, but he thinks maybe the best home he could have is one that speaks of the future. One that dreams of a big garden in the backyard of a big house; of mint plants and cleaning days and ripe peaches to say _you are my one and only_.

“I love-love you,” Hajime says again, for the first time aloud, and Oikawa blinks like it’s something crazy, and the grin that spreads across his handsome face is so, so dangerous. Hajime’s gonna spend the rest of his life with that crazy, handsome grin. 

He can’t wait. 

(Or maybe he can, because he supposes, in the grand scheme of things, that some things are worth waiting for.)

**Author's Note:**

> dreams about gardens can represent growth and potential; they can also represent love and comfort and a deep sense of inner peace.  
>   
> please leave a kudo and comment if you enjoyed!  
> say hi on [twit](https://twitter.com/SAFFlRE) too!!


End file.
